NY missive 194 - The House of Rust

The southwest corner of Central Park, early on a Friday morning

On the N train from 30th Ave, after a couple of stops I put my phone back in my bag and resist its tug and take out The House of Rust.

I had found it in the Strand bookstore, when we took the kids during their Winter break. I was by the “B” fiction row, which due to idiosyncrasies of shelving is tucked away in a corner, a bit removed from most of the fiction. I was looking for James Baldwin books. C and I had seen the “Baldwin in Istanbul 1961 - 1971” photo exhibit at Brooklyn Library for my birthday, so he was on my mind - also because the timeless clear anger and love that permeates his prose and is so needed at the moment. I was debating which of his books to buy when I saw a book by Khadija Abdalla Bajaber - The House of Rust - nearby, and chose it instead.

It was one of those moments that said “this is the book for you now”, with undercurrents perhaps being that it is set in Mombassa - I am somewhat obsessed by cities by the sea - and that the blurbs on the back made it clear it is something special, but more so being those mysterious ways in which books find their way into our lives in timely ways.

Anyway. I start reading on the train. It’s a part in the middle of the book when the main protagonist Aisha has ventured out to sea in a boat made of bones in search of her missing fisherman father. Along the way she has encountered and battled strange sea monsters, and just as my subway rattles in the tunnel between the Lex/59th and 5th Avenue stops the most significant of these encounters comes to a head in the most breathtaking, wild and beautiful way.

I’ve been battling my own demons these past months that seemed to come to a head yesterday. And here is this amazingly determined and resilient girl in her boat out in the ocean and my hands tighten on the pages and I smile with respect and relief.

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Once out of the train I walk up to JNH’s school for a monthly “coffee and donuts” gathering for parents. The theme of this one is teaching social studies “in these times”. JNH has followed his instincts for drama and film, and is now a drama studio freshman (almost at the end of the first year already!) at LaGuardia - a mighty change of scene from his small local middle school in Queens, but that’s a story for another day.

I walk up 6th Avenue to Central Park and cut through its bottom left (ok, southwest), corner. The weather’s a leaden gray which has an ominous tinge as I know this is the edge of a weather pattern that has ripped roofs off homes, and daycare centers, and megastores through the center of the country. 

I used to think tornadoes happen from time to time as grizzly one-offs, but no, this was a whole procession of them. Nature’s been getting more and more broken and mad at us, including here in the US where the year kicked off with rampant wildfires in Los Angeles. People get hit across the board but the building back is toughest for the poorest, and is physically done by the poorest, while insurance firms get wary of insuring anything that might dent their comfortable returns, and come up with creative mechanisms to avoid pay backs. 

For example, 2024 was the year with the third-biggest insured losses in over 40 years, the Economist reports. And yet “catastrophe bonds” that aim to protect issuers of insurance from major losses in natural disasters generated 20% and 18% in returns to their investors in 2023 and 2024 respectively, their strongest performance in recent decades. There are stringent criteria applied to when they have to pay out. When Hurricane Beryl caused devastation in Jamaica last year, a bond issued by the government and the World Bank did not pay out because the air pressure during the hurricane was conveniently just a touch higher than the level at which the bond would be paid out.

NY missive 193 - Here we are

Calling my pre-election post "fall" turns out to have been pretty apt. Either way that the result turned out would have been accompanied by a continued fraying: as it happens, the fraying has been accelerated.

There's now a sociopathic real estate guy back in the White House bringing his ruthless transactionalism to the global stage, with his most stakes-raising / obliterating move so far being to say that the US should take ownership of Gaza, whose people and their homes have been decimated with US support, and turn it into a "Riviera of the Middle East". Basically, an approach that involves ethnic cleansing to "clear" the way for luxury waterfront property development, into which his son-in-law's private equity firm - "Affinity Partners" - is salivating to invest. Proposals like these generate media and commentary which intentionally or not serve to legitimize them, making them a possibility through repetition and response, closing the space for alternatives, a banalization of horror. 

Meanwhile at his side stands the World's richest man who has brought in his "DOGE" team of young engineers to dismantle agencies. Greater efficiency and less bureaucracy and corruption would be great but that's not the intent here, instead it's deregulation, a convergence of land-grabs and tech-solutioneering that is accelerating capitalism's eat-itself, eat-us-all machine in darkly predictable ways. 

Within this crumbling World small interactions, smiles, gestures of kindness and humanity across boundaries small or big take on a new significance, they are a faintly beating heart that may suggest strength, or at least holding on, holding together, weaving a fabric of other possibilities that we have to be alert to, kindling them, gathering around them like fires providing warmth and light among ruins.